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IS THERE SOMETHING ABOUT ISLAM?

I took part on Saturday in a panel discussion at the World Humanist Congress in Oxford on ‘Is there something about Islam?’ which debated whether ‘there is anything distinctive about Islam’ that leads to violence, bigotry and the suppression of freedom. Other panellists were Alom Shaha, Maajid Nawaz and Maryam Namazie. This is a transcript of my introductory comments.

Every year I give a lecture to a group of theology students – would-be Anglican priests, as it happens – on ‘Why I am an atheist’. Part of the talk is about values. And every year I get the same response: that without God, one can simply pick and choose about which values one accepts and which one doesn’t.

My response is to say: ‘Yes, that’s true. But it is true also of believers.’ I point out to my students that in the Bible, Leviticus sanctifies slavery. It tells us that adulterers ‘shall be put to death’. According to Exodus, ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. And so on. Few modern day Christians would accept norms. Others they would. In other words, they pick and choose.

So do Muslims. Jihadi literalists, so-called ‘bridge builders’ like Tariq Ramadan (‘bridge-builder’, I know, is a meaningless phrase, and there are many other phrases that one could, and should, use to describe Ramadan) and liberals like Irshad Manji all read the same Qur’an. And each reads it differently, finding in it different views about women’s rights, homosexuality, apostasy, free speech and so on. Each picks and chooses the values that they consider to be Islamic.

I’m making this point because it’s one not just for believers to think about, but for humanists and atheists too. There is a tendency for humanists and atheists to read religions, and Islam in particular, as literally as fundamentalists do; to ignore the fact that what believers do is interpret the same text a hundred different ways. Different religions clearly have different theologies, different beliefs, different values. Islam is different from Christianity is different from Buddhism. What is important, however, is not simply what a particular Holy Book, or sacred texts, say, but how people interpret those texts.

The relationship between religion, interpretation, identity and politics can be complex. We can see this if we look at Myanmar and Sri Lanka where Buddhists – whom many people, not least humanists and atheists, take to be symbols of peace and harmony – are organizing vicious pogroms against Muslims, pogroms led by monks who justify the violence using religious texts. Few would insist that there is something inherent in Buddhism that has led to the violence. Rather, most people would recognize that the anti-Muslim violence has its roots in the political struggles that have engulfed the two nations. The importance of Buddhism in the conflicts in Myanmar and Sri Lanka is not that the tenets of faith are responsible for the pogroms, but that those bent on confrontation have adopted the garb of religion as a means of gaining a constituency and justifying their actions. The ‘Buddhist fundamentalism’ of groups such as the 969 movement, or of monks such as Wirathu, who calls himself the ‘Burmese bin Laden’, says less about Buddhism than about the fractured and fraught politics of Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

And yet, few apply the same reasoning to conflicts involving Islam. When it comes to Islam, and to the barbaric actions of groups such as Isis or the Taliban, there is a widespread perception that the problem, unlike with Buddhism, lies in the faith itself. Religion does, of course, play a role in many confrontations involving Islam. The tenets of Islam are very different from those of Buddhism. Nevertheless, many conflicts involving Islam have, like the confrontations in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, complex social and political roots, as groups vying for political power have exploited religion and religious identities to exercise power, impose control and win support. The role of religion in these conflicts is often less in creating the tensions than in helping establish the chauvinist identities through which certain groups are demonized and one’s own actions justified. Or, to put it another way, the significance of religion lies less in a given set of values or beliefs than in the insistence that such values or beliefs – whatever they are – are mandated by God.

And it is in this context we need to think about whether there is ‘something about Islam’. There are a host of different views that Muslims hold on issues from apostasy to free speech, views that range from the liberal to the reactionary. The trouble is that policymakers and commentators, particularly in the West, often take the most reactionary views to be the most authentic stance, in a way they would rarely do with Buddhism or Judaism or Christianity.

The Danish MP Naser Khader once told me once of a conversation with Toger Seidenfaden, editor of Politiken, a left-wing Danish newspaper that was highly critical of the Danish cartoons. ‘He said to me that cartoons insulted all Muslims’, Khader recalled. ‘I said I was not insulted. And he said, “But you’re not a real Muslim”.’

‘You’re not a real Muslim.’ Why? Because to be proper Muslim is, from such a perspective, to be reactionary, to find the Danish cartoons offensive. Anyone who isn’t reactionary or offended is by definition not a proper Muslim. Here leftwing ‘anti-racism’ meets rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry. For many leftwing anti-racists, opposing bigotry means accepting reactionary ideas as authentically Muslim. For many rightwing bigots (and, indeed, for many leftwing bigots, too), there is something about Islam that makes it irredeemably violent, even evil, and that all Muslims potentially dangerous.

Here also, liberal so-called anti-racism becomes a vehicle for buttressing the most reactionary, conservative voices in Muslim communities and for marginalizing the progressive. It becomes a means of closing down debate, censoring criticism, and giving power and legitimacy to ‘community leaders’ spouting the most backward of views. ‘The controversy over the cartoons’, as Naser Khader observed, ‘was not about Muhammad. It was about who should represent Muslims. What I find really offensive is that journalists and politicians see the fundamentalists as the real Muslims.’ Which is why many Muslims. ironically, often have more liberal views on free speech than many so-called liberal non-believers.

The real problem, then, is not simply Islam as such. Nor is it even simply the conservative strands of Islam, though such strands clearly embody odious views, are often viciously intolerant, and, where they give rise to movements such as the Taliban or Isis, can be demonically inhuman. The problem is also the attitudes of non-Muslim commentators, policymakers and activists, both liberals and bigots, as to what constitutes an authentic Muslim, the failure to see beyond the conservative or the reactionary as the true Muslim, the inability to distinguish between the faith of ordinary believers and the politicised use of faith for reactionary ends by power-grabbing, control-seeking individuals and organisations. The problem is also government policy, particularly in the West. Policy makers have all too often treated minority communities as if each was a distinct, homogeneous whole, each composed of people all speaking with a single voice, each defined primarily by a singular view of culture and faith. They have ignored the diversity within those communities and taken the most conservative, reactionary figures to be the authentic voices.

And worse, the problem lies also in the attempts by governments to encourage reactionary religious forces to act as counterweights to radical opposition, often with disastrous consequences. There is, for instance, a terrible irony in Israel’s current assault on Gaza. It was Israel itself that helped Hamas to power in the first place, viewing radical Islamism as a useful tool with which to counter the influence of the secular PLO. Cynical it may have been, but there was nothing exceptional about such policy. Many governments, Western and non-Western, have pursued similar strategies, strategies that have consistently strengthened the hand of the reactionaries against the progressives: from Egypt in the 1970s looking to the Muslim Brotherhood to keep the radical left opposition in check; to America helping fund and arm jihadis in Afghanistan; to even the French government, which supposedly disdains ‘Anglo-Saxon communalism’, encouraging communal Islamic identity when it has proved politically expedient. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s government, for instance, faced with a series of major strikes involving mainly North African workers, encouraging the building of prayer rooms in factories, because in the words of immigration minister Paul Dijoud, ‘Islam is a stabilizing force which would turn the faithful from deviance, delinquency or membership of unions or revolutionary parties.’

So, yes there is something about Islam that needs challenging. But equally, there is something about secular liberalism, and the blindness and pusillanimity of many secular liberals, the bigotry of many critics of Islam, and the cynicism of many secular governments in their exploitation of radical Islam, that needs challenging too.

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65 comments

Luke

Is Islam (and possibly Judaism) different from Christianity in its reverence for a holy text? No Christian *ever* has claimed to follow everything in the Bible (I will of course be proved wrong on that.) Eating pork being the obvious point. It is inherent in the faith that “the book” is inconsistent and contradictory. You have to pick and choose.

I am a little biased having been raised a Catholic – we don’t read the Bible, let alone follow it.

An excellent analysis, transitioning into dealing with “Is there something about religion”, which can be continued into dealing with “Is there something about humanity”. And the answer to the last is “Yes, for a long time, and we should be teaching our children about it and helping them do better” .

Completely agree with your post. I have a Southern Mediterranean mother and British father and think the weather and proximity to the sun actually has something to do with it…. Scandanavians are much more moderated and consensus oriented, for example. It takes hours for their sun to set and I think it breeds a more considered, less fervent, cultural world view.

I’m pretty sure the sun rises and sets today the same way it did in the tenth century when Scandinavians went viking. Cultures can and do evolve. We can and do learn from the blowback of our violent nature and so are able to break the not inevitable cycle of vendetta.
To me the biggest problem is the leftists denial of human nature. By refusing to face it we keep aiming wide of the mark by ascribing violence to culture or religion.

I enjoyed the piece but feel that you have concluded that everyone else is to blame for the current situation. If your religion is being misrepresented then perhaps you’re a member of a false religion. Sitting silently, watching your fellow travellers murder each other seems ungodly at best and conspiratorial at worse.

I hear this argument again and again. Why is it that if I say that ‘conflicts involving Islam have more complex roots than often acknowledged’ it is taken to mean ‘Therefore everyone but Muslims are responsible for what Muslims do?’ And why is it made only with respect to Islam and not when I make a similar argument about conflicts involving Buddhists? You say that ‘Sitting silently, watching your fellow travellers murder each other seems ungodly at best and conspiratorial at worse’. That seems to suggest that if some Muslims do X, then all Muslims are in some sense responsible for X. The majority of Christians have not publicly spoken out against Creationists or homophobes. Are they responsible for the actions of such people? Most English people ignore the actions of English Defence League, most Americans the actions of the KKK. Are they then responsible for those actions in the same way as you seem to hold all Muslims responsible for the actions of the fundamentalists or jihadis?

You compare speaking out against jhadis with speaking out against Creationists and homophobes. Two two types of lunatics are of a completely different order, as is jumping from a table vs jumping from the Twin Towers.

Once again, I am not ‘comparing Creationists and homophobes with jihadis’ (your original claim) nor comparing ‘speaking out against jhadis with speaking out against Creationists and homophobes’ (your new claim). I am making an argument about the idea of agency and responsibility. And however many times you may wish to repeat your claim, it does not make it true.

Missing from your analysis is the more practical issue of how often Islam-related conflicts arise in the world relative to the size of the Muslim populace. That says a great deal about whether there is ‘something about Islam.’ From West Papua to West Africa, there is a disturbing abundance of conflicts wirh Muslims on one or both sides that cross numerous non-Muslim cultural and religious lines, as well as division within Islam. Also following this belt is the single most common form of Islam-associated violence: female genital mutilation. And before anyone trots out how it has ‘nothing to do with Islam’, please explain how it got to Kurdistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia, when no non-Muslims cultures in Asia practice it.

Also following this belt is the single most common form of Islam-associated violence: female genital mutilation. And before anyone trots out how it has ‘nothing to do with Islam’, please explain how it got to Kurdistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia, when no non-Muslims cultures in Asia practice it.

“FGM” doesn’t exist in Pakistan in significant numbers, nor in India or Cental Asia. The reason it’s practiced in Kurdistan, Indonesia and Malaysia is because those all follow the Shafi school of Islamic Law which makes it mandatory. In most cases, what is practiced in Indonesia and Malaysia isn’t actually more severe than male circumcision. Which raises the question of why muslims are stigmatised for it.

“Which raises the question of why muslims are stigmatised for it.”
Because children have a right to bodily integrity and freedom from non-indicated surgeries. All child genital cutting outside of bona fide medical need should be abolished. Clear enough where I stand?

Because children have a right to bodily integrity and freedom from non-indicated surgeries.

So why aren’t Jews stigmatised for circumcising their male children? Especially when that’s a universal practice unlike female circumcision among muslims which probably isn’t even practiced by 50% of muslims.

Genital Mutilation is ignorant local customs practices both bu Muslims and non Muslims in those communities especially in Africa. In fact it is forbidden in Islam. A lot of the times local customs get integrated into religious rituals and then wrongly believed that these are part of a religion. It is true of all religions. Most of the conflicts in Muslim lands are political and religion is being exploited by the power grabbers to make it will of God. I am sure we all remember the history of Christian Crusades.

If FGM is considered an “ignorant local custom” then you should easily be able to cite when the Ottoman or preceding caliphates banned it, and which schools of fiqh have prohibited it and for how long. I await your history lesson.

“I am sure we all remember the history of Christian Crusades.”

You mean the Crusades, where Western European Christians after nearly five hundred years of Islamic aggression destroying the Christian communities of the Levant, Asia Minor, North Africa, and Iberia finally launched a powerful response? There were Muslim armies in France in the 700’s and no French armies in Muslim lands until circa 1100, but the Christians were the aggressors , right?

I’m not a Christian. In fact I do not even respect the religion, but this tired “Crusades” meme is just an ahistorical double-standard.

If FGM is considered an “ignorant local custom” then you should easily be able to cite when the Ottoman or preceding caliphates banned it

Female circumcision isn’t actually practised by Turkic peoples so I doubt the Ottomans would have even been aware of it. Whether a Caliphate banned or didn’t ban something isn’t a very good indication of anything. Many of the Islamic sultanates were happy to let alcohol and drugs be widely consumed, as well as tolerating other practices that would be considered stereotypically “unislamic”.

which schools of fiqh have prohibited it and for how long. I await your history lesson.

There isn’t enough research into this area to go into any great detail. It does appear though that muslim areas that practice the Hanafi and Maliki madhabs tend not pratice female circumcision. The traditional Hanafi definition of female circumcision doesn’t actually fall under “FGM”, and the rational behind it is actually the opposite of the Shafi one, ie it’s meant to increase genital sensitivity, rather than decrease it. Like I said though, Hanafis tend not to practice any form of female genital cutting.

Please see article from NYT.
“Unicef estimates (pdf) that between 70 million and 140 million girls and women globally are circumcised. The practice is widespread throughout Africa, and in some countries of Asia and the Middle East. In Ethiopia it is done by Muslims, Christians and Jews. (Gebre’s region of Kembata-Tembaro is a largely Protestant area of some 700,000 people in Ethiopia’s south.) No major religion endorses circumcision. Communities that practice it have in common that they are traditional societies where female sexuality is viewed mainly as a potential threat to family honor — in Kembata-Tembaro, the practice is called “cutting off the dirt.” To keep girls from promiscuity and ruin, the clitoris and often the labia are cut off to deaden sexual sensation.http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/talking-female-circumcision-out-of-existence/

ortega, your apologetics for female genital mutilation are grotesque. Cutting off part of the normal genitalia caries a risk of nerve damage and other complications that only an informed adult making an elective decision should ever undertake. Saying it is meant to enhance sexuality is absurd. Since almost all ritual genital cutting is done on children, it is morally repugnant of you to proffer such an excuse.

“The traditional Hanafi definition of female circumcision doesn’t actually fall under “FGM”
Well it is Type 1 FGM according to the WHO and other NGOs, but your agenda to excuse it is noted.

“There isn’t enough research into this area to go into any great detail. I”
You are simply lying. The practice of FGM has never been banned by any Islamic school of size until the late 20th century (i.e. after contact with secular humanistic values developed in the West). You denial is shameless and obvious in its agenda.

Cutting off part of the normal genitalia caries a risk of nerve damage and other complications that only an informed adult making an elective decision should ever undertake.

Which would equally apply to male circumcision.

Saying it is meant to enhance sexuality is absurd.

There are legal genital cutting practices that have no other purpose but to increase sensitivity. That’s factual.

“The traditional Hanafi definition of female circumcision doesn’t actually fall under “FGM”
Well it is Type 1 FGM according to the WHO and other NGOs, but your agenda to excuse it is noted.

I never said anything about Type 1. Why are you talking about Type 1?

“There isn’t enough research into this area to go into any great detail. I”
You are simply lying. The practice of FGM has never been banned by any Islamic school of size until the late 20th century (i.e. after contact with secular humanistic values developed in the West). You denial is shameless and obvious in its agenda.

Most practices that fall under “FGM” have always been banned by all schools of Islamic Law. I never said any school banned all forms of female circumcision. There isn’t enough historical evidence to verify the extent to which the practice was promoted or acknowledged at different times and places. Like I mentioned there muslim ethnic groups which don’t appear to even be aware of it.

“I never said anything about Type 1. Why are you talking about Type 1?”

Ortega, it is always difficult to know how to respond in life to such wilful dishonesty and denial in a debate. I specifically cited the WHO definition of Type 1 FGM, which correlates exactly to the “Shafi school” type of “female circumcision” you have been discussing, and worse, for which you have been defending.

I specifically cited the WHO definition of Type 1 FGM, which correlates exactly to the “Shafi school” type of “female circumcision” you have been discussing, and worse, for which you have been defending.

Early on, this felt like stating the bleeding obvious. How old were those Anglican students who couldn’t even work out that they didn’t follow some Biblical instructions? Then, I’d say if anyone considers that every Muslim follows the Quran/Hadith to the literal letter, they must be knuckle-dragging idiots. But ok, it put me in mind of the comments section of a few articles lately, where non-Muslims were saying just that, and if challenged, they would declare, “They’re not real Muslims then,” which you also obviously covered. They can’t see how that makes them as judgemental as the orthodox conservatives they are so against. I’ve argued long and hard about why, when there is a “Muslim issue” to discuss on TV, they generally drag on some sort of orthodox-conservative type, because “obviously” all Muslims are like that aren’t they? Where were the secular/liberals? Probably not as interesting as a robed-up Ansar, or a head-scarfed Francois-Cerrah. Therefore, I believe the media are to blame for perceptions also.
But if I analyse a religion (as written, before as practiced), I will (these days) look for the worst it can be, simply because if a religion gets so powerful, we should be able to know what to expect. Islam has a particular hatred for me (the disbeliever) and none of that can be taken out of context, or interpreted differently. But that has never meant that nice family down the road believe that. I’ve learnt, over my time that if someone is “devout,” it doesn’t automatically mean they are good, or better than you (as was implied when I was young), but may well mean that they hold to the nastier elements in their book, such as judgemental intolerances. It might not of course, but excuse me for being a bit more enlightend now.
There is “something” about Islam, and also many things perculiar to it. Some people always seem surprised when others have been trying to figure it out over the last fifteen years, and in many cases, don’t like what they see. What I’ve ended up with so far, is that with religions such as this, there is only (based on the same unchangeable texts), “good practice,” which fits in with your current society as well as possible, and “bad practice,” which doesn’t. The “True/false/distortion” etc is always simply a description of the “bad practice” in order to protect the “good practice.”

It’s much, much easier to justify violent or intolerant behaviour in some religions than in others. To treat them as if they’re somehow on a par – just because all religions have their literalists and interpreters, peace-lovers and brutes – is a dangerous overlooking of that fact.

The problem with revalatory religion is that whether someone takes the literal or the interpretive route, they still convince themselves that their version if it is the “real” one – the one God intended. Both think that their chosen scripture is inerrant, but here the interpreters are very much on the back foot: If a holy book really is the word of a God who wanted it to be understood and followed by ordinary people, why would he bury the True Meaning so deeply between all those lines of bigotry? If you want people to understand something, you spell it out. If you don’t want people to engage in slavery, you say “don’t do slavery”. You don’t say “slavery is OK” and then wait millennia for a handful of liberal theologians to tease out what you really meant. It’s the so-called “fundamentalists” that appreciate this, and they have every reason to be dismissive of progressives who tell them to read between the lines. To return to my original point, the fundamentals of some religions – the clearest and therefore default interpretation – are worse than others.

Once we accept that Muslims may hold divergent views on a number of subjects, over the whole ‘liberal/reactionary’ spectrum, the question becomes what proportion of Muslims hold relatively liberal views.

Looking at data from the 2013 Pew report ‘The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society’, Muslim opinions worldwide are depressingly reactionary, and in many cases these opinions are shared by a large majority. Unless it were found to be the case that non-Muslims from the same countries and socio-economic backgrounds shared such backwards views, then surely the conclusion that there is something about Islam is forced upon us?

I wonder also if there is an interesting parallel between Toger Seidenfaden calling Nasser Khader “not a real Muslim” and you calling the Taliban and ISIS “demonically inhuman”? They are of course as human as the rest of us, and presumably are real Muslims too. Who is and who isn’t a real Muslim is probably best decided the person themselves; if you believe the Shahadah and call yourself a Muslim, you’re a Muslim.

As an aside, looking at the panel line-up I am left wondering what the points of agreement and disagreement were. Is there a video of the event?

I did not say that individuals are ‘demonically inhuman’; I said that some movements are. Or to be more specific, certain actions taken by individuals are. Yes, indeed, supporters of ISIS and the Taliban are ‘real’ Muslims. My point was not to suggest that jihadis are not real Muslims, but to criticize those that imagine that only reactionaries are ‘real’ Muslims.

My first comment is to agree wholeheartedly with your comment that Western governments and organisations, seeking dialogue with Muslims among their own population and elsewhere, make the mistake of treating the most uncompromising version of Islam as the most authentic; I have used almost exactly the same language as you do about this when commenting (http://wp.me/p21T1L-fb) about the disgraceful behaviour of the London Law Society in promoting guidance from Salafist scholars to Muslim clients drafting wills.

My next comment is more uncomfortable. The world over, religion is used to define competing sides in communal conflicts, but those associated with Muslim identities show a multiplicity and ferocity that is mercifully rare elsewhere. Many religions, including Judaism and Christianity, have had, and nominally perhaps still have, fierce penalties for apostasy and blasphemy, but only one religion has persuaded nation states to adopt laws that enforce these. There is only one religion within which you will find major leaders encouraging murder in retaliation for insults. And (my own parochial concern) Islam outdoes the most conservative forms of other religions in rejecting the plain facts of evolution.

So, compared with other religions as they are right now, IS there something special about Islam?

“So, compared with other religions as they are right now, IS there something special about Islam?”

I would say, right now, that there is something special about Islam and I would ascribe it (without originality) to:
1) the export of Wahabi teaching by Saudi Arabia
2) The support by ‘the West’ of repressive Middle East regimes
3) The effect, noted above, of treating the most reactionary, regressive view as the most authentic.

Thus, at this moment in history a particularly unpleasant form of a certain religion is in the ascedent.
Hopefully humanity can get past this without ten of millions of deaths.

I’d be curious to see some historical perspective in all this, more specifically the contrast between the Islamic Golden Age and the European Middle Ages. The Islam of Averroes/Ibn Rushd was radically different from the Christianity in parts of Europe then.

You don’t win contemporary accolades by being better than medieval barbarism, but by developing in accord with egalitarianism, secularism, rational thought, etc. Clinging to Islam’s Golden Age is really just a damning admission of how bad the current milieu is.

I taught Spanish Medieval History for more than a decade. Most of the historiography in the area of the Islamic Golden Age in Spain is simply a biased romantic rejection-by-contrast of present political realities in Spain (at the time of writing). The “enlightened” Spanish Muslims were just as intolerant as the “enlightened” Spanish Christians. Both “tolerated” the presence of religious minorities when convenient especially skilled groups. Both engaged in pogroms and both subjected their religious minorities to degrading oppression.

Moreover, in many ways it was the Islamic “enlightened” kingdoms that first brought to Spain unfortunate practices which the Christians later adopted: the practice of deporting entire populations of vast regions of Spain to Northern Africa where they died, the practice of instituting a religious secret police (the Muslim version of the Inquisition) to weed out Muslim “converts by convenience,” taking away their children to be brought up properly in old Muslim families, the practice of reading the declaration of “convert or we will make war upon you,” at the start of battles, and horribly, the practice of impalement during wars (a la Vlad Tepes, another Christian pupil of the Muslim conquest)

The weakness in this argument is that, even as an atheist, you manage to give Islam (and all religions) an “otherness”, as if existence is separate to politics, society etc. Religion is nothing more than a human construct and we all know that our dear species has got some things right and some things horribly wrong over the years. In this case, we humans probably got Islam more wrong than Buddhism and this will be down to the conditions in which the tenets and holy books were developed. In other words, Islam as a “book” or code for life grew out of certain social conditions. As people then follow that code it started to shape future conditions (in the same way that the Marxism of “Das Kapital” is not the same as that put in practise in the USSR but certainly changed the way those people thought).
There probably is something worse about Islam and this might be the words itself in the Koran or the simple belief that these are the literal words of god. This doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with Muslims in the same way there was nothing wrong with the whole population of the USSR during the Cold War. It’s only chance where we’re born and what follows from that moment is we’re trapped in a dominant code and some of these codes are worse than others.
As humanists we need to remember that there but for the grace of pure luck we could be born anywhere. So, if we throw Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Marxism, Capitalism, Buddhism, Jainism, Scientology etc in the air and you have to live according to the rules of the one that lands on you… I wonder if you’d end up saying they’re all equal or just hope to avoid the lesser good one(s).

Agree with the general view of the article but it has to be said that the Koran is very specific and more frequently mandates violent than most religious texts. It would be hard to live peacefully in a free society without disregarding vast tracts of it.

“God told me to do it” can be used to justify any atrocity if you grant that messages from a god are possible, because there is no way to verify the existence of any gods and thus no way to authenticate or disprove any alleged messages.

Contrast this with atheism. “Atheism instructs me to do it” cannot be used to justify any atrocity because atheism is merely the lack of belief in gods; it says nothing about how you should act. So while some atheists do commit atrocities, they cannot use atheism to justify them, any more than a lack of belief in unicorns can be used to justify committing atrocities.

Arguable, simply because of the whole chunks of the Old Testament that the Quran is based on. Maybe a fair fight, based on original texts. Then the application of those texts in the modern world, is another argument entirely.

Well, via a quick googling, the Bible has about 800,000 words, whereas the Koran has 78,000, So the Koran’s “violence factor” is about (532*800000)/(1318*78000) = 4.1X greater than that of the Bible. Try putting 4.1X more salt on your next steak.

Mark Lambert…my point is that these texts do have a tone, and it’s overly simple to say that tone doesn’t matter because it’s possible to interpret these texts in any imaginable way.

Well, that would make sense considering that I figure Islam’s central prophet to be a child raping mass murderer whose chief achievement before being chosen by God was as a traveling salesman who married rich.

Islam and Christianity are about equally bad in terms of what their books say and what the leaders of their more extremist sects say.
I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that believers who reject the worst parts of their holy book are less influenced by their religion than the extremists.

And Islam, for reasons that I agree are probably more political or economic than religious, has a higher percentage of extremists than any other really large religion.

1., All very well to point out that texts are interpreted differently by different people, but it misses a major point. It is accepted by Christians that the Bible was produced by humans, and is open to interpretation. But the Koran is supposed to be the exact word of Allah, as spoken to Mohammed by Gibreel, and then recited by Mohammed to his followers, by them to others, etc until it was written down, miraculously unchanged since the words of Gibreel..
And since it is the word of Allah, it is NOT open to interpretation.
2. If you think there is nothing ‘different’ about Islam, count up the number of violent Islamic terrorist groups in the world today and compare that with the terror groups of other religions. All other religions. But don’t count those Buddhist – they are simply defending themselves against attacks by Islam.

1. Why, then, are there Christian fundamentalists who think that the world is 6000 years old because it says so in Genesis or that gays should be executed because of God’s word? And why are there a dozen different Muslim views on every issue from apostasy to just war?

2. That is a quite extraordinary apology for the anti-Muslim pogroms in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. I assume that by ‘defending themselves against attacks by Islam’ you mean ‘butchering Muslims for the crime of living in Myanmar and Sri Lanka’. It only goes to show that hatred and blindness infect all sides of the debate.

” It is accepted by Christians that the Bible was produced by humans, and is open to interpretation. But the Koran is supposed to be the exact word of Allah, as spoken to Mohammed by Gibreel, and then recited by Mohammed to his followers, by them to others, etc until it was written down, miraculously unchanged since the words of Gibreel..”

No,for either book you can find believers who think they are the literal perfect word of God, and people who claim to believe the book but reject 90% of what it says, and people who hold every position in between.
A HIGHER PERCENTAGE of Muslims are literalists, but that is a statistical difference, not an absolute one.

Christians have not wholly accepted the fact that the bible is made up by humans; as stated with the Koran, the Old Testament, and the Ten Commandments, were passed to Abraham.

The New Testament was passed from Jesus to his apostles to write down, and thus IS the word of god as Jesus, the son of God, really IS God, because of the holy trinity.

Basically BOTH books are meant to be the word of God as written down by chosen prophets/apostles (actually both books share prophets/apostles). Like the article says it is all about subjective interpretation of such words, with regards to how much of a modern context you able to personally allow them.

By and large, I feel religious conflicts across the world take root in the available geographical area and the population of a particular community. When one increases beyond a sustainable threshold, the other community feels threatened and irked. Consequently the conflict ridden community ‘hyper-populates’ to ensure it’s survival. And traditionally, the average muslim family size is more than other communities. I’m saying this from my observation of all the different religions, in India, where I live.
This however doesn’t apply in case of a few developed countries where women have relatively more freedom of choice.

I thoroughly enjoyed this post, as I do all of your posts. This is a complicated issue — one requiring far more thought than many of the comments evince. I recognize that your post was your opening comments to a debate. I would be interested to see a transcript or video of the whole debate, if that becomes available. I would also be interested in hearing the introductory remarks of the other panelists. For while I agree with much of your argument, I felt that in what you posted here you avoid the issue that there might be something about Islam that is somehow connected to violence, or at the least there is a relationship there that needs to be explored. Anti-Muslim pogroms by Buddhists are extraordinarily rare. Christian violence — that is, violence explicitly in the name of Christianity — is also rare, the Lords Resistance Army and the cross-communal violence between Christian and Muslim communities in Nigeria being the most notable exceptions. Yet the media (which, admittedly, loves this story line) show a regular diet of Christian families attacked or killed in Pakistan for blasphemy, mass persecutions of any supposedly heretical sect by ISIS (or whatever they go by now — every news outlet seems to call them something different), Boko Haram, etc., etc. — acts of violence perpetrated regularly in the name of Islam by individuals, paramilitary groups, and states. This is all aside from the multitudinous jailings for blasphemy, bans on the use of Allah by non-Muslims (as was done recently in Malaysia), arrests for preaching, imprisonment with the threat of the death penalty imposed for conversions from Islam to Christianity, punishments for the supposed defacing of the Koran or insulting Islam, and all the rest that occurs in states that have adopted Islam as their official religion. There are nominally some 2.2 billion Christians in the world, versus 1.6 billion Muslims, with near-on half a billion Buddhists, yet the Muslims numerically and proportionally far exceed these other faiths in their religious repression and violence. So there is a nexus there — it cannot be denied. The tricky thing is figuring out what that nexus might be. Is it something inherent to Islam? Something in Islam that makes it an easier tool for repressive regimes? A historical accident that the nations that adopted Islam also are ones that have resisted what might be termed Enlightenment thinking — that the Saudis would be the Saudis whether they were Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist?

As you noted, “The relationship between religion, interpretation, identity and politics can be complex.” (Even more strongly, I think they are, versus can be, complex.) And I fully agree that the media represent radical Islam as “true” Islam — though, in the US at least, a similar theme runs through coverage of Christianity, where the “true” Christians are Evangelicals, and the “true” Catholics are the hard right ones (and somehow the connection that Catholics are also Christians is not precisely made). I realize that there are other views of Islam, moderate voices, a multitude of interpretations, and I wish that I heard more from them. I hope that the full debate will be available for I would be interested to hear you and your fellow panelists tease out the complexity.

Thank you for the blog — I always learn something, and am always challenged, in the best of ways.

Nobody would deny that there are today far more conflicts involving Islam than any other faith. Nor that jihadist groups are often more brutal and nihilistic than other faith-driven groups. Nor yet that Muslim-majority countries are among the most reactionary and oppressive in the world. But it is also the case that the rise of jihadism is a relatively new phenomenon, that the character of Islam in Muslim-majority countries has changed quite dramatically in recent decades, and that secular regimes in such countries have often been as brutal and repressive as religious theocracies. So, there is a complex set of relationships to unravel here, of which Islam is certainly a part, but equally certainly is not the whole story.

I think what you are writing here is quite disingenuous. You are the first one to scream religious discrimination / prosecution if we ban the burqa, if the don’t allow headscarves in school, or don’t allow Muslims to have prayer rooms. And here you turn around and tell us that by allowing prayer rooms we are enabling Muslim extremists.

Ha. I wonder if you’ve actually read anything I’ve written on the issue? Or is it that I have a funny, Muslim-sounding name and that anyone with a funny, Muslim-sounding name must necessarily 1) scream and 2) scream about burqas, headscarves and prayer rooms? If you can be bothered to read you might start with my ‘Notes on religious freedom’. And then, perhaps, my debate on ‘Islam and free speech’. And then my post ‘On the importance of the right to offend’. I do, incidentally, oppose the ban on the burqa – but not because I’m religious, but because I’m a secularist. And, as far as I can recall, I’ve never screamed about it.

I don’t see where I condemned your views and I don’t understand where I am unwilling to discuss the issues. And I’m sorry that the positions of the people in your camp are so easily predictable.

But if you like to know my point of view: Islam is a special danger (in very brief) because 1) Mohammed started the Jihad and never ended it 2) the quran leaves little room for cafeteria Islam due to it’s claimed single authorship.

And if you bring what you wrote here to it’s logical conclusion, yes by not banning the burqa governments are legitimizing Muslim extremists whether you or they like it or not.

‘You are the first one to scream religious discrimination / prosecution if we ban the burqa, if the don’t allow headscarves in school, or don’t allow Muslims to have prayer rooms. And here you turn around and tell us that by allowing prayer rooms we are enabling Muslim extremists’

Viewed abstractly, Islam seems like a rather vanilla version of monotheism, which is probably why the Deists of the 18th Century had a certain respect for it: less mythology and ritual than Christianity, one God at most instead of three Gods at least. The original faith, however, wasn’t just a theology: it carried with it the barbarian values of the Arabs, including a profound and persistent anti-intellectual populism. The vaunted cultural achievements of the Muslim Middle Ages were mostly the work of Syriac Christians, Jews, and Persians, people who managed to be creative despite, not because of Islam. As Muslim orthodoxy gradually permeated society, original thinking was stifled—recall how the pious mobs drove Averroes out of Spain. Unfortunately, the original fanaticism and intolerance of the Muhammad’s religion has been renewed time and again by a whole series of reformers, most of them Arabs like Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, the spiritual sponsor of 9/11.

Your point about the diversity of Muslims is well taken. Religions have no bones in them and can mutate into anything whatever since scriptures are infinitely interpretable. That doesn’t mean there aren’t recurring themes in the various faith traditions, however. The problem with Islam is that it was born out of the need for absolute simplicity and certainty in an era of political chaos and that it renews itself in fresh spasms of fanaticism whenever civilization falters. It was and is tremendously attractive to populations suffering from injured pride—nothing engenders violence more surely than violated narcissism. Presumably barbarian hoards aren’t going to boil out of the Arabian Peninsula, though the barbarians of our day are bankrolled from that location. My point is that although the majority of Muslims are benign and peaceable people surely have a right to their own religions, there really is a special danger in the Islamic tradition even if it doesn’t have anything much to do with what is or isn’t in the Koran.

The original faith, however, wasn’t just a theology: it carried with it the barbarian values of the Arabs, including a profound and persistent anti-intellectual populism.
What evidence was there that the pre-Islamic Arabs were anti-intellectual?

The vaunted cultural achievements of the Muslim Middle Ages were mostly the work of Syriac Christians, Jews, and Persians, people who managed to be creative despite, not because of Islam.

No, the majority of the thinkers in Islamic Civilization were muslims. They learned about Greek concepts from Middle Eastern Christians (not so much Jews) initially, but pretty soon these had become normalised and they were reading the Greek texts directly themselves. It is true that most of the philosophers were of Persian origin, but so were most of the theologians, jurists, hadeeth collectors and sufis. The theologian al-Ghazali who is often unrealistically blamed for the death of philosophy in the Islamic world was himself Persian. There were just more literate muslims in Persia than other regions.

As Muslim orthodoxy gradually permeated society, original thinking was stifled

There’s historically no such thing as “muslim orthodoxy” as some kind of coherent or unified doctrine. A lot of the more conservative forces were themselves repressed by rulers if they caused trouble.

recall how the pious mobs drove Averroes out of Spain.

Ibn Rushd was persecuted by the government and he was never driven out of anywhere other than his job. It is true that Berber muslims were less open to philosophy but that only had an effect in Spain and North Africa. It had no effect in the Eastern Islamic world where philosophy never ended. If you’re genuinely interested in this subject then Peter Adamson’s podcast series provides a very detailed outline of the history of philosophy in the Eastern Islamic world.

Maybe I have misunderstood but are things such as terrorist movements completely independent of what is in the religious texts that these movements claim to represent? I agree that religion is can be used as a political means for opressive groups but if, say, the Quran is the means you use as a justification for your opressive campaigns surely it must matter what is actually in this text? The more one is able to, for instance, qoute directly from a holy book and juxtapose your views with this these qoutes, the easier it will be to gain support from a certain religious community?

In other words: People always interpret dogmatic religious text in many, many different ways, but they do not interpret them as were they blank pages. Might the content not matter to what crimes you can “justify” doing? And isn’t there, in this sense, actually something with Islam – as there is something (but something else) about any other religion?

the best way to ‘read’ islam, is to read as muhammad did as per sunne islam. muhammad approved of fgm – this is sunnah muqarrarah; as for jihades or as they’re known as mujihaden, muhammad said لوددت أن أقتل في سبيل الله ، ثم أحيا ، ثم أقتل ، ثم أحيا ، ثم أقتل ، ثم أحيا ، ثم أقتل ” . متفق عليه . ‘I’d love to be kill’d fighting in the way of god, then being resurrected then being killed then being resurrected then being kill’d’.
and child marriage, slavery is halal in Sunne or She’e sects or as the meat a muslim buys in butcher’s shop in a former northern yorkshire mill town.
Ofn talking about islam people start talking about today’s muslims..but one ought to take one’s cue from how muhammad saw it and his companions / or the imams in she’ism.